I’ve upgraded our family laptop to [Fedora 8](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary) (yes, we still dual boot into Windows Vista). The upgrade would have been a rather bumpy ride, except that I knew that Fedora 8 upgrades are [problematic](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common#head-7b9bf2dab0e2bdd97d98334c7198cd9cd3eaf9be) (installs are OK), and that there’s a [workaround](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=372011).
While Fedora 7 supported our laptop fairly well, Fedora 8 is even better. The power savings features are better. The Fedora community has tracked down and fixed several programs that were power hogs. The screen dims automatically while on battery power after about 30 seconds. File systems are reportedly mounted with the new [‘relatime’ option](http://www.lesswatts.org/tips/disks.php), which saves on hard drive battery usage — unless you upgrade, in which case, you have to add it manually. Improved wireless drivers in combination with an improved Network Manager connect more reliably, and more quickly, to our WPA2 access point.
*FreeNX broken, and manually fixed*
I use FreeNX regularly to connect to a remote linux box. When I upgraded one machine to Fedora 8, I couldn’t connect using an NX client. I found [a suggestion](http://www.nabble.com/Fedora-8-working-for-anyone–t4806795.html) that helped me fix it: Edit `/usr/libexec/nx/nxnode` and replace `DISPLAY=”unix:$display”` with `DISPLAY=”:$display”` everywhere. Hopefully, someone will re-roll the FreeNX packages to fix this for Fedora 8.
*Ubuntu sidenote*
I’ve heard the claim that Ubuntu is more ready for the desktop than Fedora, and up to this point, I didn’t know how that could be. Last weekend, I plugged a Logitech quick cam into my brother’s Ubuntu system. I was trying to figure out how to load the webcam driver, when we discovered that Ubuntu had already recognized the webcam, and it was ready to use.